Ravens_Flock

Joe Flacco hasn't played Championship Caliber football since the 2012 playoff run. And while he DID play well, we didn't go on that run because of him. We went on that run because of Ray Lewis. The rest of that roster played for Ray, not for Joe. And outside of a run-heavy, solid 2014 campaign, Joe has been, to put it mildly, pretty bad.

I don't want us to waste another first round pick on a WR, especially when we've ignored CB for so very long. But I also would like to see us stop bringing in aging veteran cast-offs at the end of their careers. Steve Smith had one solid season with us in 2014, and even then he dropped off near the end of the season and in the playoffs. We do not need to overpay for some washed up vet. We NEED to develop our own talent, and actually keep them. But we can probably grab quality WRs past the first round. Our top priority needs to be shoring up a secondary that has been awful since Ed Reed left.

A ball-hawking corner to start opposite an injury-prone Smith? Sound good to me. In all honesty, we need to eventually move on from Jimmy altogether. He has shown flashes in his career, but he's honestly never been 100% consistent in a full healthy season, of which he's basically only had two. Injuries aren't his fault, but what it really boils down to is the fact that he just isn't reliable. We should never find ourselves in the position we have these last few years, where without him on the field, our secondary suddenly sucks. That's a massive lack of depth. I think that Tavon Young looked really solid at times. But I also think he might be too small consistently go up against NFL WRs that many teams prefer to be 6'1" and taller. Young might do better in the slot. So IF we could somehow draft King, and IF Jimmy could actually stay healthy (hoping Young and King don't prove to be injury prone too, of course), we might actually have a sold corner group. Just get a decent #4 and #5 behind them, and we might actually be okay in the corner department for basically the first time since 2012. As for Safeties? Yeah, we need to look for young safeties of tomorrow, too. I'm still disappointed that they never really gave Matt Elam enough of a shot at his natural position (SS), but I guess sadly it's time to move on from him, and restock with new talent.

Good on Ray. Also, it's already been said, but if the Ravens were truly committed to winning next season, we wouldn't be keeping either of our coordinators. Harb's behind better be on the "hot seat" finally, I'll say that.

If Ray is ever going to coach NFL football, it has to be with HIS team, the team he made, the Ravens. A defense led by a DC Ray, or better yet, a future Baltimore TEAM led by Ray Lewis, the franchise's greatest player? Yes. That is the best possible option. In fact, just for the hell of it, give me a team with HC Ray Lewis, and DC Ed Reed. I'm sold. Sorry Harbs.

I always liked McClain. The knock on him was that he was "weak in coverage", yet they always yanked him in favor of another player during coverage situations, so they never really gave him the time to grow in that area. But he was a hard-nosed, humble guy, who always played hard, and as a sure-tackler. Very good against the run. I wish he had stayed a Raven longer, to be honest. And I never really understood why he only lasted one season in NY, and wasn't picked up by any other team, when to my mind, he was one of the best free agent linebackers at the time. I guess perhaps he chose to retire, because otherwise it just doesn't make sense. It's awesome that he has a ring with us. But it's unfortunate, same with Webb, that they were on IR during the actual playoff run, and didn't get to play in the actual SB game. He was still a great Raven though. Not outstanding like a Bart Scott, but very dependable.

I know "a lot of teams passed on him", but to think that the Ravens took Jimmy Smith in the first round in 2011, when they could have had a guy like Richard Sherman all these years. It's insane. Smith is good, but he's not first round good. He has flashes of greatness, and then frequent bouts of inconsistency. And his injury issues have held him back from ever truly improving. I'm not say we need to move on, but we do need to plan for a Post-Smith, Post-Webb world. I know Weddle will be around for a couple of years yet, probably, but we really need to develop a whole new secondary. I think Young fits in, but not really as an outside starter. Not long-term, not against these tall WRs the league favors.

Our corners behind Jimmy Smith are either inconsistent or flat out suck. And Jimmy is unreliable, as he is also inconsistent, and often hurt. Tavon Young had really good flashes, but I think he is better suited as a nickle/slot corner. We would be best served by drafting a big corner with good coverage skills and an eye for the ball to start on the outside. We do need to improve at safety as well, but I corner is a more glaring need, and has been our main issue for the last several seasons.

Sad for the kid. We really need to bring Ed Reed in as a secondary coach though.

In all fairness, Chris Redman was actually a very solid QB, who were it not for injury issues, might've made a good starter in the league. He certainly played pretty well for us, and continued to play well when he came out of retirement to play for the Falcons years ago. And to be equally fair, nobody knew that the king of arrogance and cheatness, would amount to what he has. That's why he dropped to the 6th round.

How about instead of continually taking everyone else's castoffs, we actually develop our own young, long-term receivers? You know, since we declined to re-sign Torrey, the only WR drafted by the Ravens who really developed consistently (though in all fairness to Mark Clayton, I always felt he was misused).

"Firing is a bad business model". Tell that to Brian Billick, who, IMO, was a far better head coach than John Harbaugh could ever hope to be, who was the coach who took this team from pack of losers to a Super Bowl champion in two years' time, and created the roster and culture of success (for the most part) that Harbaugh was lucky enough to inherit. Billick, by the way, got fired for a 5-11 season, one year removed from a team that posted a franchise best 13-3 record and the ONLY franchise #1 ranked defense. Not to mention its second AFC North title. Yes, 2005 was an ugly mess of a year, but quite frankly, Billick was never given the offensive pieces nor stability to work with, that Harbaugh once had. In all honesty, I've never felt that Joe Flacco was THAT much better than Kyle Boller, in fact if Boller had enjoyed a better o-line, better weapons around him, and more than one fully healthy season in his career with us, we might well have seen him do just as well as Flacco has, at his best. The 2002 Ravens team overperformed in spite losing so many important SB team players. The 2004 Ravens had literally no wide receivers of note, Jamal missed 4 games on suspension, and Todd Heap missed 10 games with injury, yet we still fought, and still just barely missed the playoffs. 2005 was a mess, in part because Boller got hurt right away, and Wright was downright awful. Not to mention many other key injuries. I still feel like Boller's late-season play in back-to-back games against Green Bay and Minnesota, were signs of progression from him. And if they had bothered sticking with him one more season, with less injuries and more pass protection, I think he certainly could have done an equitable if not superior job to what McNair offered. In fact, Boller's two games he played in relief effort showed that he was still playing at a reasonably higher level. You certainly couldn't have done much worse than the complete dud of a performance that McNair put in in the playoffs. That defense was on fire, but McNair played with zero life or fire, and threw 2 costly red zone INTs. Ed Reed was freakin' Superman in that game, notching 2 official INTs and a 3rd where he landed out of bounds. He arguably could have even had a 4th, but he and Ray Lewis both went for the ball and ran into each other. Regardless, while John Harbaugh did provide 5 straight playoff seasons, I also again think that he inherited a good team from Billick. But one thing Billick never did, was turn in two straight non-winning seasons. 2007 was a disaster, for sure, but that was a combination of a rash of injuries, and continuing to rely on a broken down McNair who simply didn't have anything left in the tank. If they had gone with Boller from the start, or actually bothered giving Troy Smith a chance to develop, who knows. The point being, I have no reason to believe that the 2008 Ravens, with Billick at the helm, wouldn't have still been successful and made the playoffs. And whether that's true or not, Steve has given John Harbaugh a hell of a lot more leeway. Our offense has never improved ALL That much from the Billick days, while the tradition of consistently great defense he helped build, has largely evaporated under Harbaugh's watch. So...yeah. I would say that at the very least, forcing Harbaugh to make some staff changes, would have been appropriate. Instead, with 3 playoff misses in 4 years, and Joe Flacco playing fairly badly in all but one of those years, what we get is a bunch of excuses, and pie in the sky notions that "oh trust us, this same exact crew could be great next year!"

"but the status quo wasn't CLOSE to being good enough this year, so lets keep the same..." Not really, We were INCHES away from being 10-6 and #3 seed in the AFC - INCHES (look back at the Pittsburgh and Washington games). We didn't get there, but we were pretty darn close. Inches? Were we inches away from beating the Bengals, who were missing their top stars and had little to play for? Yes, inches away from being one and done in the playoffs. The D's stats were inflated by playing bad teams/offenses, and that showed down the stretch. And the offense was one of the worst the Ravens have ever fielded. Which is no surprise, because the Ravens offense since 2013 (barring 2014) has been awful. It's been a problem, regardless of coordinators. It's just that the coordinators haven't helped matters at all. Realistically speaking, the common denominator, however, has always been Joe, and his very UN-Elite issues which have persisted since his rookie year. These Ravens didn't make the playoffs because they weren't good enough to. And even if they somehow had stumbled into the playoffs, there is no way we would have competed against good teams.

I often hate fans who adopt this mentality, but in all honesty, after all these years, I think Harbaugh's nonsense has finally worn completely thin. He AND his coordinators need to be gone. And Joe Flacco needs to either play like his job depends on it, or leave as well.

No offense to Kamar, but he doesn't seem to understand, as many players don't. On a team with better, healthier options, he never would have been a starter. He would not be a starter on MOST teams in the NFL. He is a good player, but there is no way he should be starting over our first round pick, Perriman, who was also severely underutilized. If Wallace weren't here, then yeah, I suppose I could see Perriman and Aiken starting, with maybe Camp in the slot. But really, we can and should do a lot better at starting WR than Aiken.

With all due respect to Mr. Smith, we should have been focusing on building up our own young WR corp, instead of bringing in aging veterans like Smith and Wallace, etc. We should have been drafting better offensive talent over the years, which Ozzie does not have a great eye for. We should have kept Boldin and Torrey Smith, because those guys were proven producers on the field here. In fact Torrey Smith is the only drafted WR the Ravens have ever properly used or developed. They mismanaged guys like Clayton, who should have spent his career in the slot, or Marlon Brown, who should have been a starter outside the entire time. That's been a consistent theme, certainly since Harbaugh's been here, of playing players out of position and not playing to their strengths. While he had injury issues for a couple of years, Demetrius Williams could have been useful to us in 2009, as a starter on the outside opposite Mason, with Clayton in the slot, and Heap at TE. THAT combination could have gotten us somewhere. Instead, we didn't even play Williams and had Clayton on the outside, with old man Houshmanzadeh (who never should have been a Raven) in the slot. Ridiculous.

Good lord. Good thing these guys aren't in charge, if they honestly think Marty should stick around. We never should have hired Tressman in the first place, and certainly shouldn't have promoted Marty.

We don't need a team that can be "pretty darn good". The Ravens have been "pretty darn good" most of Harbaugh's tenure here, except for 2015. In most cases, teams that are "pretty darn good", don't win Super Bowls. Our window was 2011-2012. The truth is, that 2011 team was the team that should have won the SB. They were a better, more dominant, more talented team, who came up short in the AFCC game for ridiculous, almost metaphysical reasons. The 2012 team, in the regular season, almost shouldn't have even made the playoffs, let alone go all the way. That team took on another life in the post-season, and I honestly believe that it was purely, singularly fueled by Ray Lewis announcing it was his last year, his last run. That team, those players, wanted to win for Ray, and they did. That was the intangible that many teams need to push themselves harder, and do great things. In all blunt honesty, Harbaugh has never been ALL that great of a head coach, and Joe Flacco has never been much more than a very average starting QB in this league. He played out of his mind, for him, in that 2012 post-season, but he needed a lot of luck to narrowly miss throwing 2-3 INTs in that "historic" performance of his. As long as Harbaugh is our HC, and Flacco is our QB, we've reached our ceiling. I don't honestly know that I see that combo being able to "strike twice", and go all the way again. It was a very odd, special set of circumstances that led to us catching fire and winning a SB in 2012. That isn't going to just come around again. I may be wrong, but let's be honest. The greats are almost all gone: Heap, Reed, Ngata, JJ, Gregg, Rice, Jamal, Mason, hell even Torrey Smith, are all gone. Yes, we have the best kicker in football. And yes, we have a few talented players on D. But for the most part, that's all we've got, and all we've had, since 2013. It's not enough. I think the Ravens really need to retool. And while I know Harbaugh and Flacco aren't going anywhere anytime soon, I'm just saying....I don't think you're going to see a Ravens team that does much more than maybe be "pretty darn good", until such as time as we have a major overhaul, across the board. New HC, OC, DC, probably QB, etc. I don't say that to disparage the guys we have. But let's face facts. We are what we've been since 2013 for concrete reasons. Yes, there was a blip in 2014, where our offense was better, because of Kubiak's run game. But we still lost in the playoffs because of a god-awful secondary, and Joe's classic turnovers. The Ravens are the sum of their parts. And logic and evidence kind of dictate, that the parts we currently have, simply aren't good enough to be better than "pretty darn good".

We need a better OC, we need to run more, we need a fully healthy O-line, etc. etc. etc. All those things are true. Yet one constant over the last near-decade, has been the QB. Let's not sugar coat things, even though I know there are still some after all these years who insist it's everything and everyone ELSE'S fault, not Flacco's. But let's be honest, and real here. Joe Flacco has shown SOME improvement from his rookie year over time, but not nearly enough. Yes, he had an amazing post-season run in 2012, with a lot of help from Lady Luck (he should have been intercepted at least 2-3 times, and in fact was INT once in DEN but the player landed out of bounds). But Joe Flacco has not looked or played worth his big money contract since signing it. Period. He had a blip on the radar under Kubiak, but even then, many of the same issues that have plagued him since his rookie year, resurfaced to haunt us then. Such as his unstoppable penchant to chuck up-for-grabs passes into multiple coverage, such as he did, with no real need to, in that 2014 NE playoff game. Flacco has never been consistent, and never will be. That is the reality. Joe is Joe. He's not "elite", and he's not "garbage", he's just Joe. So with all the other issues and problems that we need to perpetually need to fix on offense every year, let us not forget, that as long as Flacco is our starting QB, SOME of those issues are going to remain, because some of them will always be because of him. Period.

We certainly could lose, as we could any game, of course. But I love how so many, even in here, are already assuming we'll lose. Thank god y'all don't play for the Ravens.

Joe 100% lacks passion, has never played with it. He has had streaks of playing very WELL. But he is not a team leader type, and he is the exact opposite of "fiery". No one can really make a strong argument against that fact. So Ray isn't wrong, and people should not be knocking or attacking THE single greatest Baltimore Raven of all time, if the man has something legit to say about our literally struggling QB. I have never once considered Joe "elite". He is GOOD. But he's just Joe. That's all he's been for years, and that's all he's going to be. And you cannot deny the fact, that he seems to have regressed these last few years. He had a bright spot because of Kubiak's system. But the three seasons surrounding that island, have not produced very flattering stats for our veteran QB. And this isn't something that's going to change. Joe is Joe, and that's all he's ever going to be. He is not a passionate, fiery leader, like a Drew Brees, or a Cam Newton. He's just Joe. And as long as he's our QB, that's what we'll have to work with. It is what it is.

No big loss with Dixon, if you ask me. 9 carries for 13 yards isn't exactly great, and outside of some pre-season flashes, he hasn't proven anything. I'd love to see Taliaferro get some carries (as in more than 1). Hell, I'd love to see him have a resurgence and take over the #2 RB spot, and get some significant yards this season. I always liked the way he ran, and think he could do big things if he could just stay healthy.

Agreed. I hope Elam show us some improvement cause he's done nothing to get excited about. No offense, but I find it quite humorous that anyone actually thinks Will Davis is an upgrade on the roster of Matt Elam.

The nfl just seems to big for him. I swear if Elam falls over his two feet again you'll be back there instead. Poor Weddal. It's kind of hard to make that claim, when the Ravens have never really started him at SS where he belongs. He is a not a fast, rangey cover safety like Ed Reed. He's more of a Landry/Pollard type of player, and SS is where he belongs. To claim that the "NFL is too fast for him", when he has honestly been misused since day one and played out of position by the Ravens, is a bit of a stretch.

I think Elam would have developed a lot better if they had just started him at SS, his native position, from his rookie year onward. They started him at FS, then the next year messed around with him being a slot safety and corner. Really, really stupid stuff. He has been played out of position his entire Ravens career, so it's hard to label him a "bust", even though most people do. I would honestly say move Weddle to FS, and let Elam try his luck at his actual SS position, even if just for a few games. What can it hurt? Webb has been incredibly lackluster at FS, and in general, I'm sorry to say, I'd rather invest long-term in Elam, who seems like a humble guy, and might well take a reduced deal to stay in Baltimore long-term, over Webb. Webb was once a good corner, but he's honestly done. We need to move on, and I'm not sold on Elam being a total "bust" until I see him actually play several games at starting SS.